The Open Komodo Project, based on the award-winning Komodo IDE, is a new initiative by ActiveState to create an open source platform for building developer environments. The Open Komodo Project will create Firefox-integrated web developer tools that support the open web.

Best known for their ActivePerl, Komodo Edit and Komodo IDE development tools, ActiveState wanted to give back to the open source community which has long supported their products and efforts:

Meanwhile, our friends within the Mozilla Community were looking for tools and applications that advocate the open web. Since Komodo is built on the Mozilla platform and ActiveState has had a long-standing relationship with the open source community, making Komodo a part of the technology stack for the open web was an obvious choice, one that benefits both the open source community and ActiveState.

Very few of the Web IDE vendors seem to really â€œgetâ€ the web, and along with the folks at Aptana and Panic, the ActiveState bunch have impressed the hell out of me with their constant support of Open Source, deep understanding of why webdev sucks, and what they can do to fix it.

The first technology preview is expected to be ready by early November along with access to a public source repository and the Open Komodo website.

…that’s damn cool. I am growing tired of Eclipse’s bloat. I do like TextMate on my Mac… but there’s obviously more to the toolchain there in the course of developing an app. Anyway, intrigued to see what comes of this Open Komodo…

I’ve used Komodo IDE for years and highly recommend it. Now that Komodo Edit is free, there’s no reason not to check it out. The live syntax checking is a great feature, and it’s one of the few programmer’s editors that truly supports proportional fonts (no more monospacing for me). Even the diehard TextMate users should try it – it’s OK to use more than one editor! :-)

I’ve been addicted to Komodo Edit ever since I found it, the live syntax that follows through PHP, HTML, CSS, JS, XML, VB, and more ALL in ONE PAGE is sweet. For all you jQuery lovers, Komodo has had jQuery extensions since at least 1.1 and I imagine 1.2 is not far behind.
Open Komodo is everything Komodo could want (hopefully this’ll make it easier to port Firebug, I have tried to no avail). An IDE in Firefox is everything designers could hope for. With an IE-preview tab we’ll have a one-stop design program and development will get fast. This will be huge for all parts of the webdev community. Super thanks, ActiveState!

Adnan, that’s basically what Komodo IDE is, an IDE based on the Gecko engine. Firefox users (and developers) have long been using Web Developer and Firebug plugins to create themselves a semi-IDE in Firefox, although the plugins aren’t ‘smart’ – no autocomplete, code highlighting, or saving changes. Firefox and plugins are free, but the complete Komodo IDE is not (understandably) and the release of Komodo Edit was somewhere in the middle. Everyone would love an open-source web IDE, but this is no simple (or inexpensive) task, so it hasn’t been done before. I think Snapdragon will have infinite benefit to the community, so I just hope others can see this for the gift it is, and contribute the different little tools we’ve all programmed to save ourselves time – which will be very easy, thanks to the Extension-based Mozilla platform.